


Sanctum

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: Bas Lag - China Miéville
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 04:14:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17134754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: That morning, sans swan song or even any warning, the avanc had quietly died. Armada lay stranded in its wake.





	Sanctum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



The floating city straddled the line between two oceans, belligerent winds battering its sails and spires and airships. Shutters slammed; bridges bucked against their chains like wild horses, lathered with seafoam.

That morning, sans swan song or even any warning, the avanc had quietly died. Armada lay stranded in its wake.

“So it’s back to doing things the old-fashioned way,” Carrianne said. She wore a pale mimicry of her old sardonic smile; sipped her mulled wine carelessly, wiping her mouth with the backs of her fingers. “Ropes and tugboats. Wind thaumaturges. And if all else fails, I suppose we could all jump overboard and start pushing.” It wasn’t much of a joke, and she delivered it with less sly charm than she once would have.

 _Well, who among us is not at least a bit careworn, after everything?_ Bellis thought. _We have all suffered fissures through our skins and selves. We are become a city of the incomplete. A sanctum for the scarred._ Her shirt pulled against her spine as she refilled her mug from the pot at her side. Even loose as the fabric was, she inhaled sharply when it touched her.

Carrianne’s expression showed a pity that Bellis should have found cloying. From another, she might have. But Bellis had pity for Carrianne as well, and in that way the scales were balanced, and she was not resentful.

Anyway, this was no place for resentment to grow; no place for any growth at all, and for the moment Armada existed in a state of barren limbo. The uncanny currents and winds of these uncharted oceans could hardly shift the city from where the avanc’s weight still anchored it. And all its auxiliary citizenry, the necessary tugs and steamboats, still sat in wait several days’ sail over the horizon. Without them, the city could not shift. And with the avanc still hanging like rotting bunting from their hulls, the ships were stalled. Navigation charts rolled up and stored away, saws and puissant cutting-hexes dug from their containers; pragmatic in their insensate grief, Armadans went to work.

There would be no healing until they returned to more familiar seas. And until then, they waited, and worked.

“You’ll come back to the library,” Carrianne said. “Won’t you? You’re needed, desperately. Some of our catalogues caught fire in…one of the attacks. Jabber, I’m losing track. We’ve cannonball holes all over. Burns, water damage. And I know, I _know_ it’s not top of anyone’s priority list, but.” She gestured with her mug, embarrassed by her selfishness, unrepentant in her need.

“Why not,” Bellis said. “There’s not much else I can do to help.” Again, her shirt pulled damnably against her skin; again, she flinched. It would be weeks before she could do much else. She hated how it crippled her. But even as she did so, she was grateful that her wounds excused her from the more strenuous of rebuilding efforts. She was spared the need to invent some reason or other, or to avoid the recruitment parties that re-pressganged the able-bodied, willing or not.

“Better than the alternatives,” Carrianne agreed, and they both fell silent. Almost certainly contemplating the same thing.

They had walked in Croom Park earlier that afternoon, where the miniature forests were war-scarred, the tiny meadows burnt brown, and their footsteps threw up ash and leaf remnants. Most of the sunken gardens had survived unscathed, protected as they were by their surrounding wooden architecture. Still, even those verdant corridors showed scarring; plants had been picked at, harvested by medics and doctors short on supplies. A desperate deforestation, a sad consequence of Armada’s isolation.

Even the most useless of flowerbeds had not survived unscathed. What the medics did not take, the mourners did. The dead were innumerable.

Outside, Armada’s once-inexorable bustle was stilled, the babble muted. What restaurants remained open did so with a sense of shared guilt, and all the wait staff and cooks were either very young, or very old. They laid steaming plates in front of exhausted workers. Gone were the promenading pairs and couples dining in their ragged, stolen finery, or the raucous dock crews just come off shift. Now the groups were huddled, bruised and bandaged, lacking smiles and limbs. Couples sat close and held hands too tight; children were kept indoors.

Carts still carried corpses over bridges and decks, draped in sailcloth or sheeting or whatever fabric came to hand. There were fewer by the day, but still their numbers astounded. Under the branches of a rugged juniper tree, Bellis and Carrianne had stopped to watch one pass, and Bellis had wondered briefly if she ought not volunteer to help. In the Clockwork Spur, or Bask riding, where the dead were cleaned and mended and made ready for their last farewell.

They were being stored belowdecks, Carrianne had whispered to her. The Hidden Ocean’s currents were too odd, too obscurely unpredictable, and too often totally absent. There was fear among the remaining rulers, that any bodies given the traditional Armadan send-off into the seas might not be washed away. That they might refuse to sink, or be brought back up to bob along the surface as the schools of fish made meals of their remnants.

Gruesome details, gore-gossip the likes of which Carrianne could always be relied on to impart. Nauseated, but not offended, Bellis had changed the subject. And she had not volunteered at the morgues.

If the city did not move, and soon, they would have new problems. Stagnation brought on rot, and with it disease. They could not afford to linger. Even late as it was, even with the sun long set and the gas lamps lit, the winds still carried over the sound of saws and machinery. The avanc must be cut loose. They could not afford to linger.

“It seems like the worst of jokes,” she said slowly, and Carrianne nodded, indicating that she should continue; she had a taste for bleak, black humour. “We came all this way, whether we wanted it or not; and then, when we finally decided we’d had enough, when we were ready to see sense at last…here we are. Stuck. It never ends. I am tired of being stranded in places I do not wish to be.”

Carrianne murmured agreement. She was still not herself; she lacked something of her old carefree nature, and Bellis thought briefly of a girl with flowers in her hair and hands, tied tight to a ship’s bowsprit, singing into the seafoam. Captured and captured again. Where was she now? Perhaps they had left her behind. Perhaps she had sailed over the horizon’s edge with the Lover and the lost.

She would not have been the only one. The faces of Armada’s pirate-citizenry had at last found a form of unity, a shared characteristic that marked them as _Armadans_. All wore expressions like anchors, sunken and heavy, chained to bodies that drifted without direction. All carried burdens they were only beginning to comprehend.

Outside, a heavy rain began to drum against Carrianne’s rounded window. It was unexpected; Armada’s meteoromancers had spent days diverting storm clouds and precipitation, knowing that it would roughen the seas and make this last leg of the journey difficult. Apparently, they had lost their little war. The rain fell heavily. All efforts to cut the avanc loose would have to be delayed, or risk much-needed workers being washed overboard. They would tarry here a while longer, it seemed.

Bellis shivered, though she was not cold. She reached for the bucket of coal sitting next to Carrianne’s little stove and stoked the fire, rationing be damned.

Again, her shirt pulled, its rough weave stinging her half-healed welts. Bellis swore under her breath.

“I have something for that,” Carrianne said. She uncurled from her wooden chair, setting her empty mug aside. Having something to do seemed to buoy her; despite the wine they had shared between them, her steps were steady as she made her way to a worn wood chest. “Stopped by the apothecary on the _Ellipsis_. I wasn’t sure they’d have much, given how short we are on supplies. But they managed to whip something up.”

She was brisk in directing Bellis to the narrow bed; patient as Bellis gingerly removed the offending shirt and her loosely tied trousers, maintaining a vaguely interesting prattle on the apothecary’s stock and staff and history. It was more than she had spoken for a while. She settled back into the caregiver’s role she had taken on in the early days of Bellis’ fevered delirium, when her wounds still wept and threatened to turn bad. Carrianne was almost certainly part of the reason Bellis had survived it.

The debt did not quite hang between them; they were too close for that, and Carrianne would never try to settle it anyway. Still, Bellis felt some stinging of small resentment, that she had no choice but to accept this help.

She pushed it aside. She did not want it sticking to her.

“I’d understand if you wanted to keep them,” Carrianne said, dipping her fingers into sharp-smelling unguent.

Stretching out on her stomach, Bellis pulled one of the pillows over to lie on. “What?”

“The scars. So many cultures ascribe meaning to such things. Strength, or change, or the like. Is New Crobuzon one of them?”

“New Crobuzon is a lot of things,” Bellis said, settling her chest into the pillow as Carrianne began to spread salve across her back. Her hands were gentle, as always. The brief sting faded quickly into cold, blessed numbness. “A city of strangers, of the wilfully rebellious. Our only common ground is our refusal to find any.”

“Not unlike Armada, then,” Carrianne said, in a tone that said she meant no offense. “That’s fine. If we were back on Geshen, back in the Firewater Straits, we’d be covering you in tattoos. Flowers and birds, brilliant, whimsical colours. We did like our beautiful things.” She spoke of her homeland more often in recent times. Spoke of odd customs and festivals, the whim-trawlers and fortune tellers and living figureheads; she seemed to swing between patient indulgence and aching nostalgia, and it was clear that the feelings confused her. She had tried to leave it all behind. But Armada was not as it had been, and when the cracks began to show, something far older peered through from the other side.

Bellis lay still and listened. Carrianne had kind hands. Her tendency to prattle was not as irritating as it might have been, and her stories had an exotic appeal that Bellis could not help but savour. And how soothing, to lie there with the rain on the window, strange winds buffeting the chimney, forming their own, personal limbo.

For a while, Bellis allowed herself the illusion of detachment. There was nothing beyond the metal door or salt-stained window; she and Carrianne existed only in their miniature world. There was no Hidden Ocean, no Scar. No frantic rebuilding crews and no corpse collectors, no stranded city to keep them captive. Theirs was a quiet place.

She was not surprised to feel Carrianne’s hands wandering beyond the savage outlines of her welts, touching her ribs and buttocks, straying to the backs of her thighs. Bellis did not respond beyond a murmured sound of assent, and was pleased that Carrianne did not demand more from her. The unguent was set aside, the excess wiped clean on a handkerchief. And then Carrianne’s hands were easing her thighs apart. Bellis slumped into the pillow. She felt gentle fingers slip between her legs, and allowed herself just one sigh.

Carrianne gave this as easily as she had once given smiles, and there was something of her old sly playfulness in the way she liked to fuck. She would not allow Bellis to move. Her fingers were skilful, teasing their way around Bellis’ cunt, stroking her wet before sliding inside her, and the angle was a strange one, but both warmed to it quickly.

As was her way, Bellis made no sound; Carrianne followed her lead, and spoke only through the deftness of her fingers, and the soft press of her lips at Bellis’ nape.

It was an easy, undemanding coupling. And as she came to the twist of Carrianne’s fingers, Bellis felt a shapeless weight break free from somewhere beneath her breastbone. It fell away like an anchor cut loose and cast away into the depths, and Bellis knew that she would sleep easier that night and after.

After, they took their ease together on Carrianne’s small cot; Bellis on her stomach, smoking one of her disgusting, Armadan-grown cigarillos; Carrianne with her knees drawn up, leaning back into the pillows. She rose at Bellis’ request, stumbling over to her bag and fetching back the bulky oilcloth pouch. Bellis set aside her spent cigarillo, coughing slightly. She took the pouch and drew out her letter.

“That’s quite the novel you have there,” Carrianne said, settling back down at her side. “Diary?”

“It’s a letter.”

Carrianne whistled, an uncouth sound that somehow suited her. “That’s dedication. How were you planning on sending it? Tossed over the side in a bottle? Tied to the leg of an albatross?”

“I thought,” Bellis said, “That I might deliver it myself. I haven’t decided yet.” She weighed the paper in her hands. A heavy, bulky bundle; the early pages showed signs of wear, a certain yellowing to their edges, creases where she had stuffed them injudiciously out of sight several times. Little rips and dogears. Saltwater and coffee stains. What scars these pages carried. What a story they had to tell.

“I started keeping it when I left New Crobuzon,” she heard herself say, and was startled to find herself so forthcoming. She had told no one other than Doul, and his scorn still stung in memory. But Carrianne was different. “It was never intended to linger so long; I’d meant to mail it home at one port or another, but the opportunity never came. And now here it is. Whatever it is. I’m not sure _letter_ does it justice anymore.”

“Your own sworn testament,” Carrianne said, her smile lopsided. “ _I, Bellis Coldwine, present to you a truthful  and obsessively cheerless account of my time aboard the dreadful pirate city of Armada_ -”

“It’s not _entirely_ cheerless,” Bellis said, knowing as she did so that Carrianne was not wrong, and annoyed by her perceptiveness. “I’ve tried to be truthful.”

“And you are in no way biased,” Carrianne said archly.

Bellis ignored the invitation to argue. “One day I may let you read it,” she said. “And then you can decide for yourself as to its accuracy.”

She did not mind the thought of Carrianne’s eyes on this record of hers, personal though it was. These words, the feelings they represented, these were not easy things to share with another. But Carrianne was never knowingly cruel. She would not flatter or offer undeserved praise; she would not lie. But she would read with sympathy, with uncompromising affection, and that was a rare thing indeed.

“Here,” Carrianne said, passing her a sharpened pencil. “Write your manifesto, and I will be your muse. Feel free to embellish my role in the story.”

“I will not,” Bellis told her, amused despite herself. Still, she had no objection to Carrianne’s presence next to her, and the conversation died a natural death. Carrianne reached for a book from one of the precarious stacks by her bed (far more numerous than she was rightfully permitted to borrow on her card, even as a librarian, but that particular rule did not seem to trouble her in the slightest). She settled in to her reading as Bellis began to write.

 

* * *

 

_Chainday 3 rd Tathis 1780. Armada._

_We are stranded on the edge of Hidden and Swollen Oceans (such names these places have! Such overwrought, exhausting mystery!), wallowing heavily in strange waters. My dear, I do not know how we will bear it, except that I find myself more patient with you near, and now I wonder how it is that I will do without you when I am home at last. Your absence will be one more scar to wear._

_I will miss you._


End file.
